Kebabistan

For beer purists, alcohol-free suds are a joke, if not an insult. But one group in Turkey, where alcohol-free beer has been recently introduced, is taking this strange brew very seriously, warning that there's no way to have your cake and drink it too. From the Hurriyet Daily News:

Alcohol-free beer is a trap set for children by liquor producers, said Muharrem Balcı, the head of Yeşilay (Turkish Green Crescent), a Turkish association combating drug abuse and alcoholism, yesterday.

“Liquor producers target the youth to increase their market share and alcohol consumption and therefore come up with various tactics to lower the age to start drinking alcohol. One of them is the ‘alcohol-free beer’ hoax,” he said....

....“Although [the rate of alcohol in alcohol-free beer] is under the legal limit, [the amount] is very significant,” Balcı said, adding that the Institution of Forensic Medicine put forth that a 0.20 percent alcohol rise in human blood raises the fatal traffic accident risk by twofold.

As the HDN article points out, the alcohol level in Turkey's near beer is actually lower than that found in traditional fermented drinks, such as the grain-based boza or the dairy-based Kefir, that have been sold and consumed in Turkey for centuries, with little evidence showing that they have played a role in increasing traffic accidents.

Azeris looking for Nestle chocolate bars or Nescafe on their supermarket shelves may soon be in for a rude surprise. As the Swiss company has recently confirmed, it is indefinitely suspending the supply of its entire range of products in Azerbaijan, which means Azeri warehouses are now left with perhaps a two month stock of chocolate and other Nestle goodies.

While Nestle officials have blamed the suspension on "some supply problems," Azeri outlets have said it is due to the company uncovering evidence of extensive corruption in dealings between its local supplier and customs officials. More here.

Among the most recent additions to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault -- a repository located deep inside a Norwegian mountain some 600 miles from the Arctic Circle that's designed to safeguard the world's botanical gene pool -- is wheat from Tajikistan, where the harsh environment has created a particularly hardy strain of the plant. From a story that first appeared on the Salt, NPR's food blog:

Every seed that arrived this week has its own story. The shipment included seeds from a barley variety that came to the U.S. from Poland in 1938, and from a kind of amaranth collected from a small farm in Ecuador in 1979.

It also included the first seeds from Tajikistan — a small mountainous slice of the former Soviet Union, just north of Afghanistan.

To find out more about those seeds, I called Alexey Morgounov. He's a Russian who now lives in Turkey,and works for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

When you go to Tajikistan, Morgounov says, you'll see something you can't find most other places: farmers still planting and harvesting the same kinds of wheat that their ancestors have grown for thousands of years.

"People don't want to give up growing them," he says, because they know that those traditional varieties of wheat are the key to making bread with exactly the taste and texture that they want.

Homemade bread, from homegrown wheat, is the centerpiece of life in Tajikistan, Morgounov says. People there get half of all their calories from it.

And when they leave home, they like to take some along with them.

"They always bring this homemade bread to me," he says. "They take a plane from Duchanbe to Istanbul, with Turkish Airlines, and they know that there is breakfast, and drinks, and bread. They still take some flat breads, just in case."

Tasting organic wildflower honey, sleeping in yurts and long walks through eastern Turkey’s pristine countryside – each one of these on their own sounds like an enticing activity. But Balyolu, a new tourism venture based in eastern Turkey’s Kars, takes the brilliant step of combining all three into one package, while along the way helping local women earn an income.

The new project is the brainchild of Catherine (Cat) Jaffee, a former Fulbright Scholar who spent 2008-2009 travelling throughout eastern Turkey studying women’s migration experiences and also observing local beekeeping traditions. Thinking that honey making could provide a sustainable solution for helping rural women earn a livelihood, Jaffee last year Jaffee left a job in Washington, DC and moved to Kars to start working on what ultimately turned into Balyolu (“honey road” in Turkish).

I recently sent a list of questions about Balyolu to Burcu Uzer, its sustainable tourism director, to find out more about the newly-launched project and its plans. Our exchange is below:

How was the idea for Balyolu born?
Once Cat moved to Kars she started working with KuzeyDoga, a local nonprofit in wilderness conservation. Additionally, she volunteered with the first EU women's organic beekeeping program in the region, a number of local beekeeping groups and organizations, and many local beekeepers, where she started learning all about how difficult it is to earn money selling honey as a rural woman. Whether it is a lack of marketing skills, access to quality supplies, access to greater markets, a lack of long-term training and support, or the difficulty in producing a large amount of good quality honey on a small local scale - it seems that honey production is actually not that great of investment for providing sustainable rural opportunities for women.

In an effort to forge a unified Turkish nation out of a society that was far from homogenous, the Turkish state for decades tried to suppress Kurdish cultural expression (not to mention political expression). But recent years have seen something of a change. Kurdish music, film and theater and now a visible part of the cultural scene in Turkey in a way that they weren’t only a decade ago, while a Kurdish-language national television network (albeit state-run) has been on the air since 2009 and the first-ever undergraduate program in Kurdish was launched last year.

But there has been one aspect of Kurdish culture that’s been conspicuously absent from all this activity: food. In Istanbul, for example, it’s now possible to find films or plays in Kurdish, but good luck finding a restaurant dedicated explicitly to serving Kurdish food. And while bookshops are filled these days with food books that explore Turkish cuisine, you would be hard pressed to find something that deals with Kurdish cooking.

Although there have been some recent indications that there might be a bit of a thawing out in the tense relations between former allies Turkey and Israel, some Israeli egg producers are having none of it. According to a report in Globes, an Israeli business publication, a lawsuit has been filed against Tnuva, one of Israel's largest food producers, charging the company with selling Turkish eggs disguised as Israeli ones. The switcheroo is no yolk, the suit says. Turkey, the petition, notes "is a country that has turned into a hostile country to Israel in recent years and where the level of veterinary inspection is lower than the level prevailing in Israel."

This is not the first time eggs have come in the way of Turkish-Israeli relations. In late 2009, Israel's then ambassador to Turkey, Gabby Levy, had to cancel a scheduled visit to a university in the Black Sea area's Trabzon after students pelted him with eggs. The egg-hurling students were protesting Israel's Gaza invasion earlier in the year.

Meanwhile, while on the subject of eggs, Istanbul Eats has a recommendation for what is very likely the best spot in Istanbul to eat eggs, Turkish or otherwise.

Has the DIY food movement finally, as they say, jumped the shark? Homemade ice cream? Of course. Homemade beer? Why not? But homemade doner? That might be taking things too far. Still, for the adventurous home cook who wants to recreate the joys of late night doner feasts in their own kitchen, the Guardian has a step-by-step guide to creating your own cylinder of roasted ground lamb (assuming you have a small blow torch and an empty tin can lying around). The recipe can be found here, and a somewhat unappetizing photo gallery that takes you through the process can be found here.

As previously reported on this blog, the ancient Georgian tradition of making wine in clay jars (known as kvevri) has not only been making a comeback in its birthplace but has started to gain a strong reputation globally. So can the kvevri craze help turn things around in Georgia, especially in terms of developing both the country's wine and tourism industries? The BBC, in a recent report, tries to answer that question by taking a look at the trials and tribulations of a set of twin brothers who are trying to revive their family's kvevri-centric 200-year-old winery. The report can be found here.

When Germany started bringing over Turkish guest workers in the 1960's, little did the country's leaders realize that it was also importing what was to become Germany's top-selling fast food: doner. Indeed, in many German cities, doner is as much part of the culinary landscape as bratwurst and other sausages.

In a an interesting article, the Boston Globe traces doner's rise from a quick meal for nostalgic Turkish guest workers to a fast food juggernaut. From the Globe:

In Berlin in the early 1970s, Turkish “guest workers,’’ who had come to Germany during the prosperous era a decade before and were trying to make ends meet, had the idea to pack the crispy, succulent meat slices into a warm, thick loaf of Turkish bread. The sandwich evolved to include chopped tomatoes, onions, cabbage, and cucumber slices, topped with a large ladle of sauce, usually a garlicky yogurt sauce or a mildly spicy tomato sauce. The result is a tasty, robust, and quick sandwich that Germans of all ethnicities order for lunch, dinner, and after last call.

“It’s fast, but it also tastes good, it’s healthy, and it’s inexpensive,’’ says Ahmet Tetik, 46, who started working in Sultan Palast when his father, Hassan, opened the place in 1994. A regular doner there costs about $4.60 (prices at other establishments vary from $3 to $6), which is inexpensive for a meaty sandwich that packs a lot of taste.

The doner’s impact has been as much cultural as culinary, representing Turkish integration into Germany (ethnic Turks are playing on the national soccer team). Tetik estimates that 80 percent of his customers are German, including many regulars whom the family considers friends.

As previously reported on this blog, efforts by the Turkish government to set a limit on the size of bluefish (lufer in Turkish) that can be commercially caught in the waters of the Bosphorus, in order to save the fish from being wiped out, have been met by angry protests from fishermen. But now the story has taken a more violent turn, after a gang of fisherman allegedly attacked the head of fishing cooperative who had become a vocal critic of illegal fishing on the Bosphorus. From Hurriyet:

The head of a fisheries association was allegedly shot by a gang of illegal fishermen in Istanbul for his stance against the illegal practice.

Ahmet Aslan lost his left eye in an armed attack while he was sitting in a teahouse in Istanbul's Rumelikavağı neighborhood, broadcaster NTV reported on its website.

"There is a gang with trawlers, and we are under constant threat," Aslan was quoted as saying.

Defne Koryürek, an activist who has been campaigning against trawler fishing for some time, said it was “horrifying” that illegal fishers were now bold enough to try and assassinate people.

Koryürek said the number of illegal fishing boats in Istanbul had increased from around 50 in the last year to nearly 300 this year.

In a helpful blog post on the subject, Istanbul-based Dutch journalist Frederike Geerdink takes a look at the trouble on the Bosphorus and suggests that the problem goes deeper than just illegal fishing. From her blog, "Journalist in Turkey":

About Kebabistan

For many of us, the real action in Eurasia is happening in the region’s kitchens. From noodles in Kyrgyzstan to doner in Turkey and everything else edible in between, Kebabistan brings you the latest developments in Eurasia’s food culture.

About The Author

Kebabistan is written by Yigal Schleifer, a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. Between 2002 and 2010 he was based in Istanbul, where he worked as a correspondent for EurasiaNet, covering Turkey and the surrounding region. Schleifer is the co-creator of IstanbulEats.com, a guide to Istanbul's "culinary backstreets" and also one of the authors of the 2009 Fodor's guide to Turkey.

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